The director of Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1937 iconic house Fallingwater, Lynda Waggoner, recently spoke at the John Adams Institute. Two of our staunch followers, Rick and Marga Donehoo, told me later that they had seen the office that Wright designed in that same year for Fallingwater’s owner, Pittsburgh department store magnate Edgar Kaufmann, in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Kaufmann used the office until his death in 1955. It is now the only complete, original FLW interior in Europe. But how did the office from Pittsburgh end up in London? Read the article…

Short&Sweet: an interview with product designer Ekaterina Semenova, student at the Design Academy Eindhoven, about her project ‘Care for Milk‘.

Ekaterina Semenova: The idea was to preserve or to value milk, because I live in the Netherlands and it’s a very dairy country and the history of milk is so long, but the appreciation of milk changed so much. People don’t drink it much, it’s so cheap and people now throw it away, so I thought what can I do about it?

The Netherlands will hold the Presidency of the European Union in the first half of 2016. HEYU! Urbans is part of a talkshow series of the Public Library of Amsterdam (OBA). The OBA asked me to invite and discuss the urban challenges of today with six prominent thinkers, one a month from six cities in and around the EU in the live talkshow HEYU! Urbans. Literature critic Margot Dijkgraaf invites 12 of the best European writers for HEYU! Writers. Guests include David Madden (London), Stavros Stavrides (Athens), Marten Kaevats (Tallinn), Francesc Muñoz Ramírez (Barcelona), Tuna Kuyucu (Istanbul) and the mayor of Amsterdam, Eberhard van der Laan.

The Straits Times of Singapore wrote an article about my lecture with the title ‘Tackle floods? Create more space for water’. I gave this lecture, called ‘Water – Holland’s ‘Frenemy’, on February 18th for the Centre for Liveable Cities in Singapore.

The Netherlands is known for its control over water. But now that the climate is changing, the Dutch are also changing their approach towards water management. In cities more space is being created for water, the landscape is being redesigned to let water in and sometimes the dikes are even being lowered. Water is becoming a friend instead of an enemy – or better said, frenemy.Read the article…